John Rhodes the Crewman and Travis McCarran the Butcher
by Ghunter43
Summary: The story of how to very different characters from very different factions join up together! Follow John Rhodes, a simple minded yet a very high level crewman and Travis McCarran, a heavily brain damaged Grineer, which leads to his affection to things regular Grineer wouldn't have. Follow their adventure towards finding meaning of life! Fighting the Tenno! Getting more Rubee-to's!
1. The Overture

**Corpus Battlecruiser X-167, somewhere near Eris**

The humming of the machinery of the engine room surrounding John was periodically interrupted by the garbled shuffling of a plastic bag as he sat with both his crossed legs on top of a table, watching some distorted figures on a screen directly in front of him.

With no prior warning, the door in front of his post opens. Another crewman emerges from the other side and inquires:

"John?"

To which John acknowledges, while chomping on seemingly chips:

"You know this channel's pretty shit. When are we getting cable?"

The crewman walks up to him as to see what he was watching.

"You know" John further adds "I think the white circle had an affair with the orange rectangle, which hid it from the purple octagon. Then it turned into a dodecahedron. That was great."

"You do realize this is a white-noise processor? It receives a random input of data and then transforms it into random graphical shapes." The crewman states.

"Wow… That is entirely pointless."

"Well, yeah I didn't design this ship."

"If you did, you'd have put the female's locker room right next to your room, huh?" John states, while smiling inappropriately.

"Right. Shouldn't you be guarding the engine room?"

"I am. It's pretty safe, the occasional plasma bursts are great to burn your garbage."

The other crewman then looks down, and notices the bag John is holding, which reads:  
' _Rubee-to's, 98% pure Rubedo_ '.

"I don't think Rubedo is edible."

"Me neither." John says, while grabbing another handful and promptly shoving it inside of his mouth.

"Look" John adds while throwing the now empty bag onto the floor, where his Dera and helmet resided, among some other discarded chip bags, "Relax, alright? Everything is fine. We're just doing a scan around Eris and we'll be soon be back to Neptune so we can sniff some ice again. God, I hate that place."

John then picks up his helmet, shakes the dust off and puts it back on.

"Just tell board I haven't messed up. Yet. I think."

John then looks to the back room to assure himself.

"Yeah I did the right thing."

"Why?" The other crewman inquires. "What did you do?"

"Oh. Nothing. You can go. Shoo, shoo. I'm sure board has a job for you to look at some buttons."

"John, I'm your supervisor. I demand to see what you have in the back. Now!" The crewman starts walking to the back.

"No, no, no! Don't! I have nothing!" Says John, as he tries to intercept the crewman's movements. However, the crewman remained unfazed and circumvented John who, in return, stopped him once more.

"At least… let me keep him! Okay? He's gonna be our pet!"

"Pet?"

The crewman glances over the back room, only to see an incapacitated charger chained to the wall.

"What the fuck?!" The crewman loads his own Dera and aims it at the unconscious abomination, to which John intervenes.

"No! He's docile! I promise!"

"Where did you get it, John?!"

"Oh, you want one? Just go to the underdeck. There's a whole bunch of them. There's been more and more by the day, actually."

"What?! Infestation is serious business!"

"I know. Seriously cute, am I not right?"

The crewman sprints off to the nearest console so he can report the infestation outbreak to board. As he does it, the charger seems to awake from its slumber. John turns his attention to it and squats.

"Who's a good puppy?" He says.

The abomination limits itself only to snarl violently at John as he tries to pet one of its many appendages. As it reaches its mouthpiece, or something closely resembling a mouth, the abomination snaps and bites John once.

"Ow! Not you! You bad, ugly, turd shaped puppy!" John shouts.

The crewman returns to John and shouts:

"John! Pick your goddamn stuff and run to the pods! We need to evacuate immediately! And god damn it, put that thing down!"

John retrieves his Dera, points it at what he thinks is its head and remarks, before pulling the trigger:

"Just like Lassie, huh? Well _I'Lassie-you_ in hell, you monster."

"I think that was Old Yeller." The crewman states.

"You try to come up with something with Old Yeller in it. Come on, let's go!"

As both the crewman and John run off the engine room, the violent snaps and growls of various infested flood the ship.

"Alright, here's the deal. We run for the pods." John says between deep exhales by his sprinting.

"That was the board's orders!" The crewman interjects.

"I know, I come up with these ideas on the fly!" John remarks.

They stop in the main control area of the ship, to which they notice the heavy lack of any personnel whatsoever.

"Kick everything, I'm sure there's a MOA hiding somewhere." John inadvertently says.

"Did they just abandon us?" The crewman shivers. He then takes another look at John, which further reinforces his own statement.

"We just need to make it to the pods and…"

As John tries to wrap up his statement, a group of four metal-clad persons erupt from the recently made darkness. Upon sight, both crewmen point their weapons at them.

"Man, it's insane how quickly infestation grows in a matter of four weeks."

"This is all your fault! Now we have Tenno to fight!"

"These wimps are nothing but a target to me. A short, metal, fast moving target to me. God, how I hate them."

John, for the first time in a while, burst into a never-ending rage and fired indiscriminately towards the general direction of the four armed Tenno. All four of them, fell swiftly before his rage-induced plasma swarm. In the background chat, the Tenno are heard saying: 'OMG lvl 200 crewman wtf this shit game'.

"You call yourself Ninja warriors? I call you… _fucking dead._ "

The crewman seems to now see John in a different scope. His power seemed so low given his attitude towards life in general, but now, his true power had finally showed. He showed his true colors in a pressure situation. To protect him. He knew that he couldn't get hurt. He knew that he could've walked it off. He wanted to protect the rest. Him. He wanted to protect him. As this fleeting thought passes through the crewman's brain, a well-placed bullet pierces his helmet and skull from one of the revived Tenno, efficiently throwing him on the floor.

"No!" Says John as he stops aiming for the Tenno and tends to his fallen comrade, whose face was missing.

"You were so beautiful. Your carved lines in your nose and eyelids. Now, it's all red-like goop. The worst goop. Oh, crewman! Oh how I envy your low level! I wish I could see it in your eyes, the world is fresh, new and so, oh so small."

John then looks up and finds the Tenno now missing. He silently sprints towards the pods, in the hopes to catch the ones responsible for his newly-made comrade-that-he-didn't-like-very-much's death.

He follows his built-in mini-map towards the pods and meets the gaze of one of the murderous Tenno. They both stand still, watching one another from the distance. The Tenno fires a volley of MK1-Braton bullets towards John to no avail, as the bullets are absorbed by his bloated shields.

At the same time, the alarms of the ship go off, startling the Tenno. John remarks:

"It's high-noon."

Once this was said, he diligently aims his Dera towards the Tenno and tears it to pieces. He notices some other Tenno fleeing from his general direction whilst the downed Tenno screams in an unknown language. In the distance, 'darkness1998 has left the game' was heard.

"You're wanted. _With Lead_ or Alive, you're coming with me." John remarks, while charging behind the fleeing Tenno.

To his surprise, he entered the escape pods room, to find three of them gone. As he stares to the empty void of space, while somehow not being sucked out of the airship, he swore to find these metal monsters.

John then lumbers out of the evacuation area, only to be stopped at the sight of a Toxic Ancient. The Ancient slowly steps his way to meet John and, with his unholy might of combined flesh, prepares to let out an ear piercing roar. In the midst of his vocal contraction, John jabs him in the jaw with the butt of his Dera.

"Take it up with someone who cares, J.K. Rowling."

John then returns to his quarters back in the, now shut down, engine room, a room that infestation doesn't seem to dare to infest. John sits down, removes his helmet, robs his personal container for some _Rubee-to's_ and resumes his post.

A few weeks later, the space hulk of his once-upon-a-time-ship is retrieved by a Corpus capital ship and then sent to a recovery station. Since the infestation was dealt with and the irrecoverable parts destroyed, a few Flux Crewmen slithered down to the engine room. Once the door was pried open, they discovered the scene:

John, asleep, covered in Rubee-to's bags and was lying down with his belly down, snoring violently. One of the Flux Crewmen eyed the other one and sighed.

"John? You again? Why do you appear every single time I have a scavenging assignment?" The crewman on the left let out.

John jolted awake, although reluctant to get up. He moaned as he tried to get up and saw the two Flux Crewman wide-eyed, he assumed, at him.

"If I had a penny for every time I heard that." Says John, still half asleep, trying to get up with his best effort.

"Although, I have done my job, you know. The engine room is in perfect condition. I _Jugg-arantee_ it." John adds once more.

The crewmen limit themselves to sighing, as to not praise his surprisingly well done job at keeping the room in pristine condition. None of the cancerous tumors of the infested had actually penetrated into the room and as such, to every extent of the word, John had done his job.

Without breaking the silence, John simply starts walking out of the room, while the Flux crewmen resort to escorting him out. John then uses a breach in the wreckage to hop out, and once more discover the lively, busy community under the heavy and frigid atmosphere. He scanned the surroundings and found MOAs patrolling the automatic machinery, heard the gracious intercom voice instructing the crewmen around and felt the artificially-warmed air on his cheeks. He was definitely home.

As John inhales the planet-bound oxygen with great satisfaction, one of the crewmen states:

"Welcome back to Neptune, John. Just try not to destroy anything. In fact, just… don't touch anything."


	2. The Meet Up

**Grineer Galleon number 8905, fly by Neptune**

The empty darkness of space shimmered occasionally at the presence of a Grineer Galleon, which seemed to be patrolling Neptune. It kept at considerable distance, only to record ship entrances and exits.

Inside, a butcher by the name of Travis fiddled with his cleaver while sitting spread eagle on the ground.

"Uuuh" he moaned, as he inspected the handle.

As he carefully slid his fingers across the blade, he met the fizzling edge of it, and had cut himself as a result.

Travis screamed in agony as he decided to punch the cleaver, which resulted on providing him with a much deeper wound. Travis then squirmed in pain as a result, alerting nearby Grineer towards him.

As the massing Grineer, steady with their weapons slowly realized what the situation was, they collectively sighed and steadily returned to their posts. One of them even remarked: 

"The retard again. We got the short end of the stick here."

"Not… retard…" Travis murmured, almost to himself.

The Lancer scoffed him off and walked back to his post. Once the door closed, Travis clumsily rose to support himself on the wall right behind him. He held his hand closely to his chest and lumbered towards the thin hallway leading into a much larger room, the area where they kept the galleon's cannons fed with ammunition and power.

As he amazed himself with the machinery's inherent symphony, he leaned onto a ledge that enabled him to see the machinery work fluidly, as best as Grineer engineering can do anyway. Upon this, he sat down, back against the ledge and unfurled a small, a bit tattered, picture. It was of Earth. He had found it in one of the veteran's lockers and since then fawned over it. In the back, it was written, albeit very sloppily, "Earth". The picture depicted a waterfall, next to some green trees. He slipped his non-cut fingers across the faded corners of the picture and fantasized about living in such place, but as soon as the violent machinery snapped into life, so did he snap back into reality. The cold, metal, ugly reality he lived in.

He grasped the paper as if to hide it, startled by the sudden machinery noise. He scanned the room only to find himself alone there. He rose once more and hid the paper amidst his chest appendages, which allowed the paper to remain hidden. He looked towards the window showing the outer space. He walked towards it, reminding himself of the gaping wound, to discover a small trail leaving Neptune in the ever dark background. Upon the trail heading off in the ever shrinking distance, the intercom snapped to life:

"All Grineer are to enter the boarding shuttles. I repeat, all Grineer are to enter the boarding shuttles."

Travis looped his eyes around the circular window to find the vanguard of a vast Grineer ship fleet, preparing to assault Neptune. A vast mass of soldiers, a mix between Troopers, Lancers and Gunners flooded the hallways and urged Travis onto the boarding shuttles, preparing to invade Neptunian soil. His face started to show a more worrying expression as he was frightened about the ordeal. He followed the mass soldiers onto one of the boarding vessels, and the ever shrinking standing space only furthered his worry.

"Where… to?" Travis let out, to a trooper right next to him.

"Didn't you hear? The Queens want Neptune taken." The trooper answered with a dull tone of voice vented through the thick mask.

As the Grineer commander ordered various Grineer inside and then stepped inside, only to lock the loading bay doors, Travis began to succumb to his worrisome feelings, dulling out the constant grineer chatter and surrounding ambient noise.

Back at Neptune, John sat under a Heat Generator, audibly sipping through a straw on _H2-Cry-O¸_ _99% Cryotic Water_ as he stared into the nothingness of the Neptunian sky.

"Something's wrong." Said John, upon succumbing to a feeling inside his mind.

"John?! John where are you?!" said a Flux Crewman in recent despair, who stopped at the sight of John sitting next to the heat generator.

"John, god damn it! What the hell are you doing?"

"Something's wrong, Norbert." John exhaled after an audible sip.

"Of course something's wrong you nitwit, you left the radar home all alone! You missed a goddamned Grineer invasion!"

"So that's why it was beeping."

"Enough, John." Said the Flux Crewman, as he seemingly pressed random buttons. "Get to a XT, now."

The base flourished into an alert status. Crewman flushed from all possible doors and convoys of machinery and soldiers poured into the scattered anti-ship weaponry, in the hopes to catch some of the most crewed ships off guard.

Even though late response, the initial breakthrough was a massacre. With the anti-air weapons active, many of the Grineer ships did not manage to reach the ground intact, as the brilliantly placed precision beams by the XT cannons pierced through even the toughest Fomorian hull, cleverly tracking and offing transport ships first.

The Galleons that weren't smashed upon entering the atmosphere managed to relentlessly bombard areas in the hopes to scatter Corpus troops. The violent clash of crude Grineer metal and polished Corpus fire shifted the teal Neptunian sky into a violent dark red typhoon of smoke and fire. Nevertheless, Grineer ships pressed onto the atmosphere, trying to get a foothold on the surface.

Some fallen ships sheltered occasional Grineer groups that had survived the fall. However, they only managed to survive for a while until the sub-zero temperatures froze their mechanical augmentations, slowly dying out in the cold.

Although even with the destruction reigning onto the Grineer fleet, several boarding vessels managed to crash land onto Neptune, pouring several Grineer troops on random, seldom useful places. Many of those raced to a defined rendezvous points, occasionally picking off the rare Corpus tracker. Not that it'd matter anyway, the Corpus were entrenched deep into the power facilities and anti-air facilities. The least fortunate, scattered and isolated groups of Grineer were easily ripped apart by Neptune's security system.

Travis jumped as the boarding vessel impacted on the thick Neptunian ice. Upon the opening of the back, Travis discovered he had hit ground gained by the Grineer. As the icy air filled Travis' lungs, he met the red skies smothered by the dark smoke. He saw the mighty, arguably unrivaled Grineer ships torn asunder by the Guns of Neptune. He could not do anything other than succumb at the bittersweet sensation of watching the titan ships being destroyed so quickly.

"Quick." Shouted an Elite Lancer to Travis, drawing him back to reality. "We need to take the Power Station, south of the XT cannon. Those were our orders from HQ."

"What… HQ?" Travis exhaled as he looked up once more, watching the golden fireworks. The Lancer followed his gaze.

"You may be right. Let's not waste time here, though."

Travis landed on the lukewarm molten ice right below the boarding vessel and looked at the small number of Grineer stationed nearby. He looked worryingly at first, only to be put at ease by the sole Commander with them, who had consulted his GPS tracker.

"We were put off target by around seven hundred kilometers, we have to walk there. We're a week away from where we're supposed to be."

Travis looked onto the vast icy desert and the Lancer corrected his gaze south towards the objective. The skies still bled with the fuming debris when the group unanimously decided to venture towards the power station. Travis noticed a string of heat generators on the base of an icy mountain, right behind them. Upon this, he remarked:

"Follow… them?"

The group noticed the generators that extended to both sides of the mountain away from their crash site. One of the Lancers scoffed Travis' plan to follow the generators, given they headed west as opposed to south. He immediately resumed his march, where the Commander had pointed beforehand. The Commander was stuck trying to perceive the situation, but once the Lancer had left the warming radius of the nearest heat generator, he began to stutter his paces.

The remaining Grineer stared in awe as the Lancer tried to fight for one more step, only to have to fight harder on his next one. Upon his immense strength on his fifth or so step, his right leg metal augment gives in and snaps, causing the Lancer to fall and toss his weapon altogether. With this, he starts to squirm in agony as he fights for one more step forward, causing him to freeze in his pose altogether, unable to move, shout or even think.

The Commander, after the gruesome scene, gives into Travis' plans to follow the generator lines, eventually picking up the pace accordingly. The decision went on quietly, as they only registered the violent echoes of the still ongoing combat.

They all walked across the generators, hopping from one to another, never leaving its warming radius, and with this monotonous routine they pushed minutes into hours, where the skies no longer emitted the shattering sounds of the skirmish, but still kept the scars of the battle. That either meant the Grineer managed to land or the Corpus fought it off. However, the towering heaps of smoke in the ever growing distance just made Travis sure that the Grineer were beaten back. Nevertheless, they pressed on. They had an objective and, deep down, they all knew they weren't going to make it out Neptune.

Later on, hours turned to days, and in the midst of what they thought it to be the fifth or sixth day of skipping generator to generator, one of the lancers caught wind. They looked all around, and the, once again teal, Neptunian skies bore clouds as sizeable as ships themselves, carrying forth with them a blizzard.

"Crap!" Exclaimed the Commander upon this sight.

"Run, you idiots!" The Heavy Gunner unnecessarily bashed on the group.

The group sprinted from generator into generator, trying to flee from the icy blizzard right behind them. Although, even with their best efforts to keep away, the whistling wind caught up to them and fogged their vision immediately. In spite of this, they charged in one after the other, having a rough sketch of what was ahead before the storm had hit them.

In a bee line, one after another, they all ran almost blind. The piercing cold was finally getting to them in spite of the heat generator's best efforts to balance the temperature around them. Suddenly, Travis hit metal and fell. Metal stairs. This was a Corpus made structure! He looked around, confused, tired and cold to see if he could see anyone. He worked himself up in spite of all of the wind pushing him sideways and called out with his deep voice:

"Anyone?!"

But only the wind replied with its whistling passage. In the meantime, Travis' breathing was getting harder. He decided to press on the Corpus structure with a second wind, as it was the most likely safe location. To his surprise, he fell flat once more onto ice.

"Was it… a bridge?"

Travis lingered on the floor, letting the wind slide past his face. His second wind had worn out as he crawled away from the bridge. With his vision fading, he was unable to measure how fast he was reaching and how far he was going. Finally giving into the blizzard's hands, Travis stopped. Seeing that he had nowhere to go, he had finally accepted his fate. He tried to reach for his tattered picture, and took a gander at it. With his frostbitten lips, he drew a small smile of having the place of his dreams be his last image.

As his head dropped down and he prepared to close his eyes due to fatigue, he captured a figure rushing from the horizon only to reach for him. He could not keep awake any further, and this stranger's hand was the last thing he saw before collapsing unconscious.

Travis bolted awake, now inside a corpus building, laid upon a bench next to the wall. He figured that he wasn't dead and even better, not cold! Travis recalled the picture and inspected both hands as well as his chest appendages as he rose from the bench. From right beside him, John sat on a perpendicular bench with his Dera laid out on the floor.

"Looking for this?" John said, shifting Travis' attention to the paper he was holding. It was the picture Travis held most dear.

"No!" Travis shouted as he tried to reach for it, only to be stopped by John's hand.

"Relax. Not going to do anything." John said, as he handed out the picture back to Travis, who, in return, steadily stuffed it inside his appendages.

"That's Earth. You know Earth?" John broke the silence.

Travis had another thing set in his mind, and thus, he frowned as a response.

"Why… are you… not shooting?" He said after a brief pause.

"I figured no one would be around at this time, especially under a blizzard like that. You'd have to be stupid lucky to survive that. Plus you aren't really carrying any weapon, so, one could figure you were harmless. Also, you drool in your sleep." John replied, sounding a bit condescending near the end.

After a bit of silence, John says:

"Tell you what, warm yourself by the plasma core."

With this, John smashes the nearest terminal's keyboard with his fingertips and, from the ground, emerges a boxy machine glowing bright blue.

"Corpus don't exactly like exposing the power stations' cores, but it gets cold around here."

Silence dawns in again, as both watch the bright core in the middle.

"The name's John Rhodes. Nice to meet you." Says John, as he extends his right hand towards Travis.


	3. This is bad

Travis looked puzzled at John's hand. He, at first, did not acknowledge what was in his mind and perceived his hand raising as a threat. On this, Travis frowned.

John, realizing the situation, went in and grabbed one of Travis hands, who he had coyly retracted them.

"It's a handshake!" John remarked as he shook Travis' hand.

"You have a name? I'm sure you weren't kicked in your head without anyone shouting your name angrily."

Travis' frown faded as John let his hand go and the humming silence of the power core overtook the situation for a few seconds.

"Travis." Travis said with a heavy, thirsty voice.

"Nice to meet you, Travis. Say, do you want to get to Earth?"

Travis' surprised gaze met the ever glowing visor of John. He then frowned and twisted his lips, as if not believing what he had to propose.

"I can take you there. I know its coordinates, anyway. Just need some sort of ship that can actually move and I can take you there."

Travis looked up once more. This time more confident in John's words. To this John fondles a nearby locker, and gives Travis a small liquid bottle.

"Here, some water. Probably the last one for days."

As Travis swallowed the contents of the bottle, John plotted an escape from Neptune while the ever sizzling core engine flood the then quiet room.

Once Travis deliciously wet his tongue amidst the liquid contents of the bottle, John had an idea. An idea so crazy it'd take two to accomplish. He opened the small core room's doors to see that the very distant sun now shining on the frigid landscape of Neptune. Seemingly, hours have passed since the deadly Neptunian winds have crossed beyond the base.

With alacrity, John sped through the icy passage that clearly led to an XT cannon, located right above them, ever so vigilant of the skies above, not seeming to move. Travis had difficulty to keep up with John, who was sprinting ahead and reached a small crevice between the icy wall and the XT cannon. From there, they both could scan an entire area where Corpus ships laid to rest.

"By my calculations" John starts. "Those are a shitload of miles away. We'd take some time to get there."

John examines the area around, and surveys the reachable ground in the giant icy mountain that supported the XT cannon. He slowly set to step on some firm ground amidst the steep drop. Upon finding some, he set out to find more firm ground. A step turned into step, into another step until it turned into a roll and loss of control. When John found himself, he was rolling down the hill, bouncing off the drop only to come down and hit it once more, seemingly only gaining velocity until he smashed face first onto the frigid ground.

Travis instead took the elevator that was right next to them.

Once Travis' ride gleefully bleeped into a stop, John dusted himself off and remarked:

"Flawless landing. Let's take a jog shall we? There's a lot of ground to cover."

The two set off to the Corpus shipyard, curiously following the iron bridge set out to facilitate the way to the shipyard and not actually using it. Once the shipyard was in sight, they set out their looks towards a small resource carrier laid to rest for the day. John smiled upon this sight, and panted:

"That's the same one I crashed a few days ago!"

Travis looked worried for a second, but quickly forgot it once the ship's figure closed down on them. They now stood in awe looking at the ship's rear.

"These are larger than I thought." John said.

Scanning the access gates, John noticed a couple of Crewmen lounging between the ground controls. He promptly shoved Travis and himself to hide from the crewmen. John then gathers some icy shards and throws them behind the crewmen, in the hopes to distract them so they could made a dash for the ship. Instead, they paused the conversation and one of them remarked:

"What the fuck, John?"

"Oh, you saw me. Uh, mind if we stroll in?" John outright asks, while slowly approaching the crewmen.

"I'm on my break. Besides, this isn't even my ship." The Crewman states.

John then hints up to Travis to follow up and the crewmen resume their conversation. As they entered the vacant ship, John remarked:

"Sometimes, asking is the way."

They approached the ship controls, only to be met by a dormant blue. The ship was off and slumbering when the duo disturbed the doors.

"Alright." Roared John from the fizzling silence emitted by the control panels. "These buttons here should be the start up, these the ignition and these over here make a cool sound." John then presses one of the 'cool sound' buttons, engaging the main weaponry the shuttle bore. Not soon after, the ship ahead of that one creaked as the well landed plasma shots cut through the hull.

The nonchalant crewmen outside quickly evolved into an alarmed state.

"John! Come on! That was my ship you idiot!" The same crewman from before yelled out. John, realizing the mistake, jumped on some more buttons and kick started the ship into a busy rattle.

"Alright Travis, hang onto your wrinkles, we're moving this baby out." John said, as he grabbed some levers and smashed some more buttons. The ship rumbled into life as the thrusters pumped its weight up, commencing thusly the launch. Even though the stairs connecting the ship to the ground were firmly placed, the sudden liftoff ripped apart their foundations, sending the boarding crewmen flying.

John quickly re-oriented the ship to exit the orbit as he scanned Earth's coordinates. Travis, in the meantime, looked pretty worried as he scanned the outside, seeing countless crewmen swarming the area. Either to stop the two or just to see what was the problem, Travis was still a Grineer soldier after all.

John shouted a happy "aha!" once he punched in Earth's coordinates and the ship started thrusting itself towards it. The ground seemed to move at an increasingly faster pace and until the shipyard was out of sight, having mountains of ice speed past them. Or so the monitors showed.

Travis looked onto the monitors and the ever glowing coordinates map, he smiled briefly as he carefully unwrapped his hidden picture.

"We're hours away!" John shouted as he slid his chair across the control, letting out a swift and long "Woo!" on the way. Once John came to a stop, he slowly rose and told Travis, while leaving through the back of the control room:

"Well, after that ass-clenching experience, I'm going to take a piss, I'll be right back. If anything beeps red tell me."

Travis gleefully sighed and nodded in response, and sat down, yet gazing upon the picture of his dreamy green grove. He'd finally get to it! After years of empty loneliness amongst the dark metal cells he forced to call home, he was finally going… home.

When Travis started succumbing to his daydreams, a loud crash interrupted his train of thought, followed by a constant beeping and deadly amount of smoke pouring in from the ventilation system. Travis quickly saved the picture into his pocket and rushed out to call out to John. It was to his surprise when he saw the ship cut clean in half, by what seemed by a circular projectile. He felt the uneasy winds of the altitude kicking in as he held himself in place. He saw the other half of the ship falling behind and shouted to his best intents for John. Looking around the ever falling wreckage, he learned that he was also losing altitude as quickly as the other half was. He panicked and shouted for John harder while frantically darting his eyes on the wreckage in front of him.

It wasn't until a few seconds later he saw what seemed to be a figure, leaning forward, sitting down, holding something in a room that wasn't totally obliterated by whatever had hit them. It was John! And, uh… he was sitting on the john. With his front wall clean smashed from him, it was clear he was too focused on his newspaper to notice that half the ship was gone! Travis tried to shout him to get inside, but the violent winds whistling through the fuming debris muted Travis' attempts. It wasn't until the third try that Travis decided to rush inside and hold into something hard.

He rushed in, tumbling about, sitting in a chair and gripping it as hard as he could, closing his eyes as if somehow that'd make the impact any less intense. After a few minutes of rumbling, the ship finally reached the ground and smashed straight into it. After the violent clash of metal, Travis passed out.

Once he came back to his senses, he found himself locked behind a plasma shield. A cell made to contain him inside and when he examined his surroundings, he noticed he was sitting in a transport convoy, next to the crash site. A small transport rover, ready to transport him and a few debris off into the nearest prison and scrapyard, respectively. Crewmen were scattered everywhere trying to scrounge up some debris to hoard back to base.

Once aware of his consciousness, a lonely figure approached the convoy and tapped on the metal beside it. Travis shifted his attention to the blue figure. It was a Corpus Comba. Leaning against the plasma cell, the Comba simply asked:

"Finally awake, eh?"

Travis only eyed his face without any possible response.

"Very well, I'm unsure whether Grineer are actually fluent in any sort of language, but I'm Executive Ormah'Lore. I'm responsible for this particular Neptunian sector. The one you happened to crash into."

Travis slowly examined his surroundings, unable to find the other half of the ship. He returned his gaze onto the Comba.

"Where… is John?" Travis let out.

"Oh, you do talk. You mean the crewman fellow? He's John… uh…" Ormah'Lore replied.

"Rhodes." Travis finished.

"Yes, well, Rhodes was sent out to a purifying bath." Ormah'Lore quenched Travis' thirst, only for Travis to fire back another question.

"Purifying… bath?"

"Yes, he was on the lower deck's bathroom. The one right above the waste compartment. Once it crashed… well… I'm sure you know what happens when you drop a box with no top on and full of water on the ground."

Travis looked puzzled for a while before realizing what had happened. Instead of fighting or in some way showing resistance. He just laid down. Numbed partly because of the fall, numbed partly because of the death of his dream also partly because of the humiliation of John. So, instead of fighting, he just laid. And stared at the now starry sky.

After a short while, the rover roared into life and they started driving off, heading into a convoy of debris-carrying rovers. Travis tried to fight the urge to sleep for what seemed hours, though he kept on thinking of what could've become of his future. He did know he was heading for execution, since the corpus rarely find anything useful in Grineer troops. Or so he thought. John was gone too, wherever he went, there'd be no way in hell he'd know where Travis was and where he was headed. All these thoughts plagued his mind before he started to succumb to the sleepy feeling.

As his eyes dozed off, he noticed weird lighting shining across the metal rover behind his. He lifted his head up to check what it was. But before he could gather any sort of intelligence, the lights rammed into his rover and turned it around, crashing it through what seemed a small hill down in the ice.

Bounce after bounce, the plasma cell snapped off the chains that tied it to the rover, landing in front of the rover. Travis rose from the overturned cell to find John, now in a pretty green suit, as opposed to his regular blue suit. John then smacks the cell with a prod and disables the plasma shield, enabling Travis to get out. Travis gave him an ocular rundown of his newest suit and asked:

"What… is that?"

"After the bath I found out where you were and where the convoy was heading. So I needed to bolt as quickly as possible. I didn't have any clothes, so I stole it off of some dude's locker."

 **Back in Neptune Base's locker rooms**

A lone figure stepped out of the showers, still wet and cooling from the hot water bath. Oddly enough, while his muscular body was only covered by a measly towel on his crotch, he was still wearing his corpus issued helmet. He paced back onto his locker door, only to find it broken into and his items gone. The figure snapped in anger and shut the locker door as hard as he could. The name tag on the door read "PRODMAN, JOHN"

 **Back at the Convoy crash site**

"But anyway, come!" John said. "We have to get the hell out of here!"

As Travis walked out of the back of the crashed rover, he noticed the rest of the convoy's armed crewmen taking positions to fire at the Comba's demand. Ormah'Lore set his eyes on the lone Crewman wielding the prod guiding the Grineer butcher into a cargo rover.

"You!" Ormah'Lore shouted out loud. "John! Bring him back right now! It is an order!"

"Fuck you, Ormah!" John snapped in response. "Your rulebook sucks! What if we have to pee during Section 49?! And your living room isn't as quaint as you say!" Ormah'Lore gasped in an offended tone, before ordering the crewmen to open fire. Once the lasers started illuminating the dim ice, John sped the rover deeper into the vast icy desert. In the distance, Ormah'Lore projected his anger:

"I'll get you for this, John! Just you wait! I'll get you for this!"

John, either not hearing Ormah'Lore or simply ignoring him, he kept on driving at a dangerous speed throughout the icy desert. The adrenaline started dying down as the ride took a more silent tone. Travis, a bit disillusioned, broke the silence:

"What now… John?"

"I don't know." John replied, sounding a bit discouraged. "We're in deep Neptune, now. If we turn the rover off for even a second the damn thing freezes and we'll be next. Thankfully I stocked on gas before coming here." Upon this, the machine beeps out a warning that read " _Warning: Fuel at critical levels._ "

"I did stock up, just not in a very large amount." John self-explained.

John, upon turning left through an icy canyon, met his headlights with something shiny. He roared in laughter as he identified the object as a ship and they could use it as a possible way to maintain body heat. They slowly approached the ice encased vessel and parked the rover next to it. The rumbling engine took over the ambience as they tried to discern an entrance to the ship. After detecting a possible breach in the hull, John turned the emergency heater in the rover.

"It'll do with for a few minutes with the gas we have, but we have to be quick."

They both excitedly hop out of the rover to rush towards the ship and the breach seen earlier. To their surprise, ice encased the breach and they had to dig it out. Upon further inspection, they've also located a smaller ship strung to the bigger one. John regarded it as a landing craft.

"Shit, this ship wasn't made to land. This may or may not make it difficult on us." John turns to Travis.

Travis frowns but he looks behind towards the rover.

"Hurry." Travis adds.

"Yes, yes, keep digging." John intently adds as he vehemently strikes the ice with his gun. John then hit a soft spot on the ice that opened the breach into the contents of the ship. He directed Travis to step inside while he rushed to the rover to get some handy tools. To both their unfortunate being, the rover's gas ran out and the heater shut off as John was trying to return to the ship.

The cold immediately bit John who was still a few steps away from the vessel. Travis had the benefit of being in a semi-enclosed structure, but soon also started to feel the penetrating cold. He looked out of the window for a few seconds to see John still struggling with the cold, but now he could finally see how really powerful John could be. His bloated shields protected his insides from a flash freeze and in turn emitted a basking blue glow. He moved slowly, even then, but still managed to crawl into the ship. He saw, inside, that the shields weren't making as much effort to protect him from the deadly cold, but it was still seeing that Travis was having a hard time not freezing to death. John took this as an incentive to pick up the tools he had and some nearby scrap metal that the ship was apparently carrying, most likely due to the lost dogfighting it may have done.

Once he jury-rigged the hole patch, he rushed towards the consoles in a last ditch effort. He knew that the ship may have been there for a very long time, making the fuel cells within the ship either unstable or outright useless. Giving them no guarantee that the ship would even turn on. He kneeled down on the front and started hitting buttons. Once a combination of the same was input, the ship jumped into life. The systems opened and the lights, the ones that weren't broken, flourished into life. John laid back down as a familiar, yet excruciatingly annoying voice popped out from an intercom:

" _Warning: Temperature is at lethal levels. Balancing… please wait."_ This said, the air started feeling lighter, as the temperature steadily increased into non-lethal levels. Both John and Travis exhaled in happiness as they both never been so welcoming of lukewarm weather before.

As John now intently scanned through the various holographic screens of the ship, he took notice of the writing.

"This is… Tenno language!" John remarked.

"Tenno…?" Travis lifted his head with an inquisitive tone.

Upon this interaction, a lone figure starts to move from the back of the ship, under a collapsible trapdoor, the figure approached the two men. They were still unaware of the figure's presence. That was, until John glimpsed the underdeck.


	4. They Call Me Vi

John peered at the slowly advancing figure and his eyes widened underneath his visor. The carved silhouette behind the somewhat lit back room exposed an elaborately carved Nova, advancing to the ignorant threat of the pair in the control room. Unarmed, confused and recently off stasis, the Nova slowly advanced onto the dashboard and a voice started to discern itself from within the frame.

"Who…" but before the echo of the voice even returned to itself, John started screaming. The screaming quickly evolved into a hail of blue plasma, ripping the machine to shreds from the indiscriminate wave of blue, leading the stasis-frail machine into a collapse and destruction, seemingly spawning another creature of itself.

John quieted his volatile screams as his weapon clicked dry. The frame caught fire on its last moments onwards to its timely demise as John quietly passed by the debris. He looked onwards only to see the other figure spread across the ground, behind an ever glowing machine almost tucked around the corner to the left. John's curious eyes locked onto the prone figure, only to hear its feminine pleas fade into nothing:

"Why is it not working?! Lotus?! Or-ordis?!" she said, while rising slowly and sitting by the tilted ship's wall.

John approached the figure and stared right into its shape and size, before letting out:

"What the fuck?"

The figure jumped in surprise by the startling presence of John and his visor's vibrant blue glow. The creature raised its hand to meet John's face and launched a pretty orange beam, though smashed against John's thick shields and returned to the creature as a result. John, reacting to this after a solid eight seconds, befell upon the figure's kicks and shoves, as she tried and retried to cast her powers onto John:

"Damn it, it won't work!"

John eyed the creature inquisitively. Never has he seen one like it! So small, in a 'pocket size' and finally grabbed her arm, drove it up and dropped it on the air.

"What are you doing?" She asked.

"What are you?" He retorted, leading the creature to eye him in oddity. After a few seconds of uncanny stare, a fumbling around was heard and steps made their way towards the creature and John. It was Travis, and he too looked in awe at the small creature.

"What… is it?" He asked, as he poked her spread legs on the ground, leading the creature to recoil her legs.

"Stop! What do you want?" She pleaded.

"Protection from the Corpus." Immediately replied John. "Goodness, you're so tiny. Like a newborn Kubrow." John then proceeds to pat her violet hair.

This response and course of action both surprised and disgusted the creature. After leading John's hand away from her head she turned to both of them:

"From the Corpus?"

"Yes. We managed to piss the wrong people off. So, wait, are you the creatures that drive those things?" Finished John on a non-sequitur, pointing towards the smoldering heap of trash that was once considered a Warframe.

The creature looked around the corner and found her Warframe torn to pieces.

"No!" She helplessly exclaimed. "Damn it, it took so long to get her."

After this, she rose up to meet the machine straight ahead of the cockpit's door. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, attempting to call yet another of those machines. After a few seconds of successfully quiet the scene down, she grunted at her failure to recall another machine.

"What's wrong?" John asked.

Unwilling to answer this for him, she just sprinted off to the furthest room tucked away in the back of the shuttle. John and Travis exchanged looks before deciding to venture downwards a bit more. Upon the circular door's swift opening, the pair peered inside. The somewhat small hall branching into the widening room housed a gargantuan chair in front of a deep hole managed to amaze the pair.

"Woah! Look at all these high techy stuff. Corpus executives will cream their pants!" John remarks, as he picks up some random debris.

The small humanoid then rapidly steps on the odd throne-type chair and attempts to fiddle with the appendages it sprung. Once it obviously failed, the humanoid sunk her face into her palms and devolved into producing senseless noises.

"So… you're the Tenno eh?" John asks while approaching the purple humanoid with pockets full of debris.

"What do you want?!"

"You've already asked that." John replied as he started looking towards the somewhat stable walls.

She fell silent and the group now basked in a collective awkward silence. For the longest time, Travis and the creature interchanged looks for quite a bit until John finished scanning his eyes among the Tenno's space architecture.

"Quite impressive stuff. How do you keep it powered?" John asked towards the small humanoid. She replied with a piercing stare but eventually let out:

"Solar power. We use a bunch of solar panels to absorb power."

"Figures. You can't land with this one, can you?"

"Yeah… I was stupid – it was a simple mission…"

 _ **Humanoid Flashback**_

 _It was a simple mission. Go in, exterminate a corpus base then leave with a potato. Lotus warned us about the anti-air weapons and advised us not to park our orbiters too close. But I wanted to get ahead. I wanted to land first and ahead of the rest. I was stupid. As the others started their landing craft far from Neptune, I sped through them. I tried to run for the landing craft as I sped past the planet but... all I remember was a violent strike. After that, Ordis lost control of the shuttle and it continued forward. We were unable to evade shots but it was turning out of control. I think the reason Corpus didn't decimate us involved the fact that they wanted this ship. Or so I think. After a bit of freefall, we impacted the ground and I don't exactly remember what happened after that. I just remember waking up from stasis as the ship struggled to come online. Then I met you lounging in my cockpit, and then causing my Warframe to be shot to pieces until my Transference stopped working. For some reason._

 _ **End of Humanoid Flashback**_

John sat quietly at the chair's feet with his legs crossed. With his hands supported by his elbows on his legs, he looked intently into the story.

"Woah." He huffed, spacing out for the longest few seconds. Unsure whether to add to the situation, he claimed the obvious:

"So." He then paused. "Suffice to say we're stuck here." John takes a look around, reinforcing his stranded point.

"So wait, you mentioned a ship cephalon. What happened to it?" John inquired after rising, dropping some more debris to the floor.

"Presumably, low power. It's in emergency mode, and it's drawing power from the emergency batteries. Which… really don't last very long at this rate, unless we have power them back with solar power." The humanoid said.

"Well then, we have just the thing we need. The sun! Outside. Of this canyon." John said. "Say. You wouldn't have a manual connection around here somewhere, do you?" John asked in a curious tone.

"Yes, I do. It's right below the trapdoor." The creature added.

Without further ado, John started moving out towards the main area of the ship, leaving Travis to lag behind and the creature to stand helpless on the chair.

Peering from the front of the cockpit, John managed to take notice of the unfueled rover outside, with the emergency heater still wide open. Should they manage to hook up the heater to the emergency batteries, and then rush the panel straight to the frail sun's beams, they should be able to melt all incapacitating ice. With this expository paragraph racing through John's mind, he paid no heed on his actions and ran head first, literally, on the hole they previously had patched.

With hurry and recklessness he sprinted off with his best intentions. The cold started to bite the innards of the shuttle as it, in an almost futile attempt, tried to maintain acceptable heat inside. John started slowing down as his shields started tanking the frost as well, but he managed to power through almost effortlessly while trying to reach the rover. Once he managed to get his hands on the side of the rover, he noticed that the lid covering the cable for refueling was frosted shut. His almost slow-motion punches did nothing to remove the frosty encasing of the lid. His vain attempts at breaching the ice only furthered his anger and frustration towards the situation which led him to add insults, screams, grunts and tears to his current action.

Almost falling to desperation, a rather cool looking figure stepped out of the ship with a heated cleaver in hand. It was Travis. Struggling to keep with the frost, he too lumbered towards the shuttle. In his slow pace, he raised his firmly held cleaver above their heads and struck down as fast as a snail riding a turtle, but was able to dislodge the congealed lid. With this momentary victory, John read a small inscription labelled across the cleaver's blade: _"Deus Ex Machina"_.

Disregarding that senseless drivel, he 'rapidly' retrieved the cable and 'rushed' back to the ship. With cable in one hand, and the other filled with more debris, he stashed himself in the nearly deadly cold ship, and hooked up the cable on the small manual connector that laid beneath the trapdoor. With some luck, the cable snapped in and power started being deviated from the emergency batteries. To both their content, and the freaked out humanoid's fortunate fate, the heater started emitting its embracing aura, leading the area to become habitable. For a while anyway.

Not soon after, John sped out and crawled on top of the machine, heartlessly dislodging the solar panel there displayed. He charged carelessly outside the canyon's faltering shade towards the somewhat dim sun, traversing the Neptunian clouds. With the ripped innards of the shuttle poured over the way to the impromptu standing solar panel, power surely started to recharge the emergency batteries and regular power was restored the ship. Allowing that dreaded ship cephalon to come to life in its normal status.

The creature, undecided to be awestruck by the restoring of the power or the goodwill provided to her by a Corpus and Grineer agent kept her aghast mood. Her train of thought was interrupted once the ship cephalon's voice echoed through the ship:

"Power fully restored! Operator! How nice to see – WARNING! INTRUDERS ON THE SHIP! COMMENCING INTRUDER NEUTRALIZATION!"

The humanoid, still slow on its brain processing speed, urged the AI not to take any action:

"Wait, Ordis! Stop! Don't do anything!"

The ship's hidden machinegun turrets aimed at the operator in a confused manner, as to which Ordis asks:

"Operator, there are agents of the Grineer in the immediate vicinity! We need to get you to safety!"

John, with his timing, jumped off from the hilly he stood above the ship into the fractured patched hole.

"The thing's up and running!" He gleefully intervened, locking his arms on his thighs and proudly looking up.

Perhaps startled by the sudden appearance of a Corpus agent or by premeditation, Ordis opened fire on John. Through his unwavering stance, he consumed the entire hail of bullets and even through the Operator's orders, the entire turret's bullet feed was consumed on trying to take down John. Once the metal symphony protruded by the turret ran into a dry click, John then took the opportunity to exhale very audibly, allowing the smashed, large caliber rounds to unhook themselves from his bloated shields and clutter the ground.

"That's… one way to say thank you." He retorted.

"What… IS this?!" Ordis asked, surprised at John for surviving the ruthless bullet hell. This surprise seemed to spread on over to the Operator, who also stared somewhat surprised.

After this small interaction, the Operator turned to Ordis:

"I-uh- told you so. Please, stop doing that. They're… uh- not enemies!" Even after the benevolent good will demonstrated by John, the Operator still refused to call them friends.

"Yes." John simply stated.

Ordis focused on John and Travis, seemingly staying behind him. Still unsure, he was held back by his Operator.

"Now that we got the pleasantries out of the way, we need to repair the ship." John finished.

"Right." The Operator chimed in. "Ordis, damage report please."

Without haste, Ordis started listing out the damaged hull, systems and what was the most convenient way to repair them:

"Several hull breaches detected. Void travel deemed unsafe. Commence direct repair on visible holes in the hull. Engine subsystem critically damaged. Void or terrestrial travel deemed impossible. Please retrieve the fried systems and commence direct repair. Landing Craft transfer system damaged. Please unclog the halls. End of damage report."

"That's it? Spring cleaning?" John asked, greatly over-evaluating "spring cleaning" by his own dictionary.

"It's not that easy." The Operator interrupted John's scheme. "We need a sturdy material to handle rough flights and prevent leaks. The engines need to be at optimal condition to travel beyond light speed and the Landing Craft transfer system needs to be cleaned to be able to send us out."

"The shipyard nearby can help us out." John added. "You wouldn't have your ship blueprint laying around, would you? We can jury-rig our way there, tell the repair bay what to do and blast us off."

Ordis chimed a 'yes' towards the ship blueprint request.

"What about the insurmountable number of Corpus units stationed nearby?" The Operator asked.

Travis, for the first time, decided to intervene:

"I can… distract… them."

John pondered the situation before turning to Travis once more.

"If we managed to bring your way onto the back and trigger the alarm, we can distract the garrison towards your area. Then we might just be able to swoop in and flash repair the ship." John said. "Nice."

Travis huffed a 'yes' while the Operator resorted to nodding in confirmation.

After setting their way to the machine, retrieving debris and melting them to serve as outer hull, and managing to kickstart the subsystem into semi-functional position. Hours of fizzling welds, hammer thumps and makeshift electrician - _ism_ managed to turn the dead husk of metal into a very rough functioning ship. The engines now worked at 20% of their original strength, the hull now sustained fast land travel and the landing craft was now accessible. The sun was now hiding beneath the horizon's hills, and they took it as a good infiltration omen.

Once the ship roared its engines, John took this as an opportunity to turn to the Operator:

"Alright. It should be somewhat set. I'll go retrieve the panel, while you get her hovering. Don't go too high or the XT cannons will rip us apart. Once we're there, stay distant but aware of the hangar's doors. Once possible I'll open the doors and let you through."

"Wait!" The Operator asked. "How about the radars?"

"They don't really aim their stuff this low. They aim their stuff up. If you keep low enough they'll just think it's a rock moving at very high speeds." John let out.

The Operator nodded and retreated to the Somatic Link stationed in the back of the ship. As John was leaving through Landing Craft hall, he turned to Travis, who was ready at the bottom:

"Help me snap this thing into place."

With great strength and strife, both of them managed to hold the ship up long enough for the hall to snap into the orbiter. Whether this was helped by Ordis or not, the pair sighed in relief when the weight was off of them. Once this was set, the ship rumbled to life. The small parts still encased in ice snapped off with the exceeding brute force and the engines flickered their weakened streams as the pair resorted to climbing the ship.

Once up there, John took the time to re-set the solar panel onto the ship, bolting it in place with one of his robbed tools.

"Travis." He requested. "Hold on tight, here, we need you to get well around the back and hopefully alert the base towards the wrong threat."

Travis gleefully nodded as he frowned in a determined look. John then bumped his feet on the hull, to which Ordis took it as an incentive to scan the surrounding area – ultimately finding the shipyard. It set its course there and thrusted to its destination, all the while toppling over the stolen rover with the cable. While the start was easy going and slow moving, it quickly evolved into a turbulent ride with the desert of ice speeding past them. The violent winds stopped once the ship came to a violent halt, propelling them both forwards.

"Alright. Flawless." John admitted, as he rose to dust himself off.

As with their plan, as John and Travis approached the hangar, the Operator moved the ship out to the back to follow John's plan.

John hid behind some terrain deformations while he waited for Travis to sound the alarm, who then rushed behind the metal infrastructure and was rightly spotted by a security camera. The crewman behind the camera jumped in alert, and set out the alarm for an intruder in the immediate area. Troopers rushed behind the lone cleaver wielder as he led them away towards a back entrance. John managed to rush towards the hangar, skipping past the security cameras' watchful eyes. He sneaked across the catwalk and found the repair bay's controls, unmanned, as he predicted. He smashed the keyboard with an input of commands, opening the bay's doors and clearing the blueprint to follow. On this note, his old boss barged in on him powering the bay:

"John? Is that you? John?! What are you doing here?!"

"Norbert! Hey. Long time no see, it's been what, three full days? Damn, I was happy not thinking about you." John replied.

"What are you doing-"

Norbert was then interrupted by the large Tenno shuttle hovering straight to the repair bay.

"Is that a…?" He gagged.

"Yes." John said, after straight socking a punch on Norbert, knocking him straight out. John managed to lock the bay's control doors before the Tenno ship docked straight into the bay, but it still managed to gain some Corpus attention – which led to the some base troopers to flood the area. Though ultimately reluctant to do so, Ordis finally uploaded the ship's blueprints to the repair bay and the automated arms started spotting and fixing the ship, ripping apart the patches and jury-rigged band aids and actually fused strong materials to fix the shuttle, metal was scrapped and torn asunder to be replaced with functional, more durable parts and materials.

As the bay continued on its course, John found himself surrounded by troopers who requested immediate access to the control room. The beating on the door became even louder when John decided to lean against the window that showcased the grouped Corpus soldiers trying to barge in.

"I love separate systems, folks!" John said, as he once more retreated to the control room's terminals. Upon his interaction with these, the security turrets all around the repair bay activated with due haste, and started firing over at the Corpus crowd.

Now under suppressive fire from the turrets, those who were unfortunate enough to sustain its direct fire died on the spot, while the rest of them retreated away from the repair bay, otherwise they'd be subjected to awful positioning combined with unstoppable fire. With some room to breathe, they let their guards a bit down as Travis made his way straight back, with his pursuers retreated, as the turrets once more took matters on their own hands.

John spied Travis entering the now vacant room and exhaled a happy shout:

"Get in, Travis!" He said, as the repair bay retrieved the landing craft for further repair.

Travis clumsily entered through the landing craft hall before the repair bay finished its repairs on the orbiter. It was starting on the landing craft when the turret system went offline. John, startled by the sudden deactivation, turned to the control room's panel before finding out that the troops were, once more, returning to the repair bay to apprehend everyone around. Seeing that they could most likely deactivate the orbiter, he ran out and shouted as best he could:

"Get out! While the doors are still open!"

Ordis, inside, relayed the message to the Operator while she stared at the screen.

"Why?" She inquired. Ordis did the favor to relay the message outside.

"Just do it! They're coming here. Just. Go! Seal the Landing Craft hall and drive out!" John shouted back, to which Ordis explained to the Operator.

The Operator reluctantly nodded and told Ordis to leave as soon as it was possible, leading the orbiter to trek slowly outside, trying to find a way to speed up out of the planet. Not long after, John tried to overload the system's power – possibly causing an internal power shutdown for a few seconds. No guarantee of it succeeding, he turned the command on with a slight delay and jumped out of the catwalk adjacent to the control room onto the landing craft. Managing to fit himself in the otherwise Warframe-only indentation, he assumed the controls of the landing craft as the entire Corpus base cleared out of power due to his tempering.

While only able to haphazardly fly the small ship, bumping into several other obstacles in the way, he aimed course towards the ever rising orbiter. Thanks to his tempering, the nearest XT cannon was disabled. Also thanks to his tempering, it was only temporary as the cannon managed to activate almost as the ships rocketed far from the atmosphere.

Narrowly evading the destructive beam, John shouted as he took his course a more bent route. The Operator took the orbiter away from John as the shot once more pierced the skies. Be it dumb luck, high piloting skills or a combination of both, they both managed to leave the Neptunian atmosphere, into the welcoming dark abyss of the big empty. With the adrenaline dying down, and the presumable Corpus fist wavering left and right from the Neptunian grounds, they sighed in relief as they managed to wander far from Corpus ground.

With the sun's bare beams shining upon the cockpit, Travis added towards the Operator.

"My name… is Travis. I didn't… say that… before."

From the intercom, at fantastic timing.

"The name's John Rhodes, by the by." He said, after a few seconds of silence on his side of the radio. "Oh, oh, right you can't see me. My hand is up waiting for a handshake."

The Operator seemed to finally chuckle and let out:

"That's fine. They call me Vi."


	5. Trinity of Failure, Anger and Grind

Soon the quieting rumbling of the shuttle overtook the cockpit. The adrenaline seemed to die down, as the shuttle's power cores were being filled by the sweet beams of the distant sun. This silence was interrupted once John attempted to dock back, causing an alarming crash on the way. He appeared from the back, marching slowly as if the landing shuttle took a toll on his body. He reached the cockpit and let out:

"Well, _Vi-olleta_ , I'm all torn up. I'm not sure how you do it, with all those spikes causing discomfort." He finished, stretching his entire body.

For a bit, Vi looked a bit disillusioned, albeit rather happy to see John's appearance. With no further ado, John took the hint:

"So… what now?"

"I'm not sure." Vi replied. "My transference still won't work, and I still have no Warframe."

John looked into the back, and saw the Tenno arsenal under a ceiling light.

"Don't you have more? Can't you call more?" He asked, sitting next to Vi, crossing his legs.

"I don't have any other than Nova. I was trying to recall her back but the reason why she was destroyed must be due to my transference being… you know. Gone."

"Yes… I do know." John said, peering off in the distance, lying through his teeth.

The rumbling engines once more overtook the ambience. John laid down to enjoy the trip and Travis, though tempted to continue his mute stay, instead asked:

"Can't you… get one?"

Vi looked back to Travis, who sat near the ramp.

"I mean…"

As Vi tried to finish her thoughts, John rose up. He approached the twin terminals parallel to each other in their respective corners of the cockpit. Silently, he turned to his left, and started fiddling with the terminal there sitting.

"What's this?"

"The market, it's where I can spend my credits on weapon and equipment blueprints." Vi recalled, after stuttering briefly.

"So… what's platinum?" John asked, raising his left hand to support his chin, while he tapped the screen several times with his other hand.

"I'm not sure… never got any." Vi replied, as John's monotone symphony of taps on the glassy screen filled the room.

"There we go." John finished his tampering. "I bought you 713 ten-cipher blueprints."

Vi lift up in a frowned state, and rushed to the terminal, looming over John's shoulder as she aggravated her expression of anger and frustration.

"Why?!" she, practically, shouted.

"Well, no need to thank…"

"We're bankrupt!" Vi interrupted John, while pointing and the meager amounts of credits that lingered in her credit account.

"Not entirely." John added, followed by a few more taps on the screen. "There, now."

"You idiot! How are we supposed to use the foundry now?!" Vi retorted.

"Relax, Vi- _oncé_." John rose and stepped out to meet the corridor. "Where do you get more of them?" He finished, pointing towards the still standing pile of metal in the midst of the shuttle.

"Uhm, that's Nova. The blueprints drop from the Raptors, but I really don't want to go through that again." Vi replied, shivering mid-way through her sentence, as if remembering woes of the distant past.

John scratched his own helmet trying to decipher the meaning of that sentence while Vi lights up as she heads over to the codex console.

"But there's one I want to get!" Vi breaks the short-lived silence, showcasing Trinity's figure drawn on the holographic screen.

The pair glared from behind Vi, silently watching her draw her rant.

"She's so dreamy! Her powerful skills mix her offensive abilities into a warm, loving aura of healing and support! None fall before she catches them! She's like Demeter but, you know, less naïve." Vi finished, as her eyes glittered like organic diamonds. All the while, Travis sketched the words ' _Is she okay?'_ in a piece of paper before presenting it to John, to which he replied:

"I can't read that."

Upon finishing her rant, Vi averted her gaze back at the pair, who jolted back in response, leading Travis to hide the paper in a panicked mood.

"So? Can we go?" She asked, with the ever glowing expression drawn across her face while the cockpit was overtaken by a near blinding ray of light protruding from the relatively close Sun.

"Yeah… sure." John replied, covering his visor from the blinding sunlight. As Ordis shifted the windows to dim the inside, John took the opportunity to follow up:

"How do we do it then?"

"We need to rush to Ceres, and attack the node called 'Exta'. We'll need to fight Vor and Kril together. Those two folks, in particular, tend to carry them around somehow, and for some reason."

John refreshes his expression with a powered will and a strong resolve. He leapt forward and clenched his fist, then spreading open his palm across the keyboard on the solar map hovering over their figures. Ordis scorned his attempt at manually inputting information and shoved the computed coordinates itself.

"Don't get cocky, you unbearable parrot." John grunts out, as the orbiter's engines started the _Faster than light_ drives.

Suddenly facing warping speed, the ship bolted straight to Ceres after a bit, stopping to orbit the Grineer planet at a safe distance. Ordis targeted the landing craft towards _Exta_ while Vi practically raced to the landing craft bay.

Once the carved warframe slot drew onto their minds, only seemingly able to house a single occupant, became a huge hurdle that they have not thought of before.

"How… do we go?" Travis blurted out.

"I have an idea." John replied, with a masterful sneer added to his expression.

Without further ado, the landing craft dislodged itself from the bay and started slowly aligning with the node in order to begin its route towards the dwarf planet. John turned to Travis and exclaimed:

"Hold your breath!"

Travis barely had any time to react as John forced the bay doors open, and used the sudden explosive decompression to propel himself towards the shuttle. Although still aghast by his move, Travis followed up shortly before the shuttle began its speedy course. Travis sunk the cleaver into the craft's hull in order to hold himself, while John slipped on the appendages he relied on, only to hold himself by the Liset's back tail.

The flight was rough but as soon as the ship entered Ceres' atmosphere, it almost turned into a piercing flight of hell. The cruise speed coupled with their entry of the atmosphere, the ship quickly turned into an inferno ball, spewing fire from the sheer high velocity of the shuttle.

Travis took advantage of his hardened armor to shield his face from the unrelenting inferno, hiding his head beneath his struggling arms by holding the stuck cleaver.

After what seemed like an everlasting, impassable vile imitation of hell, the speed of the craft started lowering, and with it the flames it once spewed were no longer a concern. Not too long after, the ship made its hasty landing to a Grineer shipyard, hovering over an open Grineer structure.

Travis took this opportunity to slip down and land on his own, almost scorched feet. John, on the other hand, took the opportunity to slam straight down against a pile of crates. All the while the ship spat Vi out, carefully landing on the still scalding arms of Travis, who then jumped out in agony.

The landing craft took this as an opportunity to leave while Vi rose to dust herself off.

"Goddamn, that was a rough landing." She let out, as she cleared her light purple pants off of any dust.

Travis replied to this by frowning and shooting a stare to her, all the while a pitch black figure erupted from the ruined crates. It _looked_ like a regular corpus crewman, and since John was the only crewman along with them, they assumed it was him. Although he was black as black comes. His blackened figure resembled only that of a silhouette of John but something odder, it was as if that particular space in that particular time was just cut with magical scissors from existence, only remaining the total dark abyss of which they intently peered into.

But, as soon they've peered into the figure, blue streaks of color erupted from the dark void of seemingly nothing, leading John to rise his head and lift his hands above him, seemingly clenching his hands, as if he was to grab something. With this, he let out a deep, half agonizing, half relieving moan that managed to echo in the somewhat open metallic Grineer structure.

Soon, the streaks enlarged, overtaking the dark abyss, ripping it and shredding it, giving place to a basking blue glow. Once the darkness was all but consumed, John's figure returned to the astounded pair still deciphering the situation, finishing with John's thick gasping. Once a moment of silence settled in, John roared out:

"Shut… The… Hell up, lady."

Silence reigned in for a bit, allowing some of the alerted Grineer to approach their location, lured by the sound and the sudden flash of blue light. As they approached the three, their shouts drew their attention.

"Tenno scum!" it was heard. The three jumped as they almost did not dodge the bullet barrage ensued by the ambushing Grineer. John jumped behind some of the fallen crates while the others fell behind ones still intact. Some of the Grineer took this opportunity to retreat and alert the base, calling further backup, while others took it as a chance to gain more ground on the three.

John managed to reply in the same way by shooting back in a fit of blue plasma, and Travis resorted to pummeling whoever came close, due to the fact he had forgotten his cleaver in the ship's hull.

"I can't fight!" Vi shouted out. "My transference still doesn't work!"

Nonetheless, they managed to push them back. The Grineer melded into the hallways leading to the open area they were making their stand and eventually lead to a moment of silence between the groups.

"Right. I think I saw only a couple of soldiers fleeing to that particular door there. Let's get to it!" John shouted, pre-emptively reloading his Dera for further firefights.

As they headed out through the metal plane, hopping catwalk to catwalk, moving in between the mountainous halls ravaged and pierced by the Grineer architecture and machinery, they noticed that the Grineer soldiers had left them… alone. None to be seen. None to be heard either, as the only sounds that replied to their inquisitive stance, where those of machinery alone.

They eventually turned up in a platform which surveyed a large opening of the cave - allowing the group to oversee the mechanical operations of the incessant crude machinery of the Grineer. The wheezing wind grazed by them as they stood in uneasy silence, they looked around as if the ambience got somehow even more eerie.

Out of nowhere, a heavy hammer of metal fell upon the group, aiming to knock them off their feet. Pushed by the impact shockwave, Vi and Travis recoiled at the sudden attempt on their lives. Once unfazed by the situation, the metallic figure raising the hammer onto his shoulders as it intently stared into the separated group.

Both Vi and Travis looked onto the distinctive figure and let out, before joining John's side:

"Lech Krill."

"So, you're Lech Krill, eh?" John inquired, walking up from the back of the group.

"Wait, where's-" Vi tried to question before the sudden barrage of Captain Vor separated the group once more.

John, unfazed, turned around and, with the same inquisitive tone as before, let out:

"So, you're an old man, eh?"

Vor scowled at this impudent crewman before teleporting to the platform where they all stood in a glaring mexican standoff, before noticing Travis. Although mostly scorched, Travis' armor still bore the shape of Grineer armor. When Vor glanced over at Travis, his voice echoed on a cold and harsh tone:

"Why have you forsaken the Queens, butcher?" He let out, piercing Travis with his stare.

"He ain't here to make you happy, old man." John walked over, putting himself between Travis and the old man.

"Why has the Corpus decided to defile this ground with its presence?" Vor then directed himself to John.

"We're here to grab your prize, Vor." John replied, reaching for his Dera, managing to release a burst of plasma, before Vor simply teleported next to Krill and evading the burst completely.

The pair sighted the group with an almost pitiful look, as if their combined power far towered above two puny henchmen and a kid. Vor laid eyes on the kid they lugged around as it was his _true_ prize.

"Tenno." Vor smirked.

"Playing fake-out isn't fair!" John said, shooting once more at the pair.

The group fired into a combat. Krill took the opportunity to swing the hammer at Travis and John while Vor leapt to kidnap Vi. Though as soon as his mug loomed over Vi, John took a swing with his Dera, in attempts to stave off the old pervert.

"This ain't your kiddie bar, you creep." John said, while flailing his Dera up in the air, pushing Vi back with his retreating pace.

Krill seeked to smash his hammer against the distracted pair. Though confident of his attack, he felt it interrupted mid-way. Travis, with his arms crossed by the elbow and enveloping the hammer with his forearms together with the scorched armor, tanked the hit. Krill shot up into a rage never seen before. Screeching and shouting, Krill took the hammer out of this lock and once more swung at the somewhat stationary Grineer butcher. In spite of this, Travis managed to outright tank or openly dodge Krill's slow attacks, which seemed to only fuel his screeching anger.

On the other, parallel side of the battlefield, Vor still tried to reach Vi. Angered by the pesky crewman waving his gun around, he held up his key as to aim it towards Vi. The golden beam then fired produced a shield around Vi, pushing John aside.

"I grow tired of you." Vor grunted, as he now marched onwards to the prone John, aiming to drain him of his shields then perforating him with a hail of bullets. John kneeled up, though perched between Vor and what seemed to be a long way down towards the core of heavy machinery, he kept his ground and tugged at his now-turned-melee Dera.

It was at this time that Krill found an opening in Travis' defense, and struck him square in the torso, sending him flying across the field, straight ahead. Crashing through scaffolding, he disturbed the surprisingly fragile support of the structure that still towered above the group. As the whole thing came down, various beams and heavy metal disrupted the flow of the backpack that cooled Krill's armor, resulting in a hazardous flash freeze beneath the crumbling metal. Not too soon after, the metal structure hit the ground, crashing and smashing Krill into tiny frozen pieces.

Though surprised by the violent impact, Vor did not turn around in time to respond to the still flying body of Travis. Hit by a direct impact, he was sent flying past John, who saw him falling to his death.

However, in a somewhat quick motion, Vor used his teleport once again to at least grab onto the ledge and resume the fight. As he finished his travel through space and time, his eyes caught figure of the pesky corpus crewman, still tugged to his rifle, already mid-way through his swing.

"I got you now." John stated, as his rifle's butt met Vor's face after the swing, sending him to plummet towards a violent death in the innards of heavy machinery.

As the machinery coughed and wrenched the remains below them, Vi's stasis shield collapsed, releasing her into the world once again.

"Born again I see." John laughed. "Oh man, I crack myself up with these."

Travis, after a short while, rejoined the group, looking below to the stuttering machinery.

"Where… is it?" Travis asked Vi.

"The blueprint?" Vi inquired, darting her eyes between John and Travis. "I, uh, don't know. Usually when it's over, I just get it."

"Which it should be soon." John barged in the conversation, pointing towards the fallen metal structure, emitting fire and spewing molten metal. They took it as a bad news sign and started to make their way back onto the extraction bay.

This time around, the Grineer were busy with keeping the structure stable, and as such, they largely ignored the group that just invaded their private space. The odd Grineer that tried to single them out was quickly evaporated in a vicious wrath of blue plasma and fist power by John and Travis, respectively.

Practically racing down from the high up structure as it collapsed in an unrelenting inferno, the group met the rendezvous extraction place, and their presence triggered the landing craft to fly over in order to pick them up. Vi up and slotted herself in the indentation, while Travis mentally prepared himself for the ride again. John from, an unstopping sprint, screamed all the way until he jumped and held Liset's back tail with dear life. Travis picked up on this cue and followed soon after.

Not too long after the less abrasive exit flight, they docked back into the orbiter and silently put themselves inside. When they finally sat in the cockpit, the unnerving silence pressured Vi to shout out loud:

"Ordis! Mission report!"

"Success, operator! We've gathered a bunch of credits, some alloy plate alongside circuits, but most importantly: the Trinity helmet blueprint!" Ordis chimed in, for the first time bringing joy over mindless rage.

Vi jumped up in happiness as she punched up the Foundry in order to start the blueprint construction. The foundry gleefully obliged with barely enough credits to begin with and presented the 12 hour estimated time of forgery. In the other hand, Travis and John just up and sighed in relief, as the object they wanted was in fact in their hands.

"Now, where's the rest?" John inquired, after a moment of relaxation.

"The same mission." Vi gleefully added.

Travis and John interchanged looks, confused.

"They're… dead." Travis states.

"Yeah, well, we've killed them once, they return every time we re-do it." Vi adds.

"Well, alright then!" John exclaims, as he taps his right palm with his left fist.

John walked off towards the Landing Craft bay after ordering Ordis to lock Exta's coordinates once more. Vi widened her smile while Travis slumped over and sighed in despair at the transport method again.

Once again they jumped as the ship dislodged itself from the orbiter, holding themselves on the back tail. Soon the ship entered the atmosphere and the entire scenario replays for the exterior-bound folks.

When landing, the group was attacked in a similar way, to then they replied in a similar fashion and not too long after, the soldiers cleared out in an unnerving imitation of what had happened previously. It was as if the curiosity of Vor that ordered the soldiers to retreat was still present even after his timely demise.

They jumped from empty room to empty room as before, though the type of room and the order of them differed from last time. At last, they met the gruelling pair in the same scary way as they had before, in the same battlefield.

"Alright boy and girl, we got ourselves here a ballet rehearsal." John relayed his cryptic words to his teammates.

As soon as John played these words out, they proceeded to endure the fight in a painstakingly equal detail as they had before. Obviously leading to the bosses' mutual demises, the group once more fled back into space in the hopes of receiving fantastic news on arrival. As fate would have it, though, Ordis relayed the sad fact that they had gotten a duplicate item, the only one they were building at the moment.

Though frustrated, they didn't falter. John leapt back into the ship as Vi and Travis followed up. They landed again. And returned again, this time to some good news! The Chassis had been captured and immediately they started production.

This close to finishing the Warframe, they rushed for the shuttle again. Returning to yet another duplicate, they jumped back into Ceres. Once more returning to duplicate items. They continued this until the fourth or so time, before Travis and John eyed Vi as tired zombies.

"Well, the Miter is on the way." Vi giggled nervously.

After a number of agonizing hours of attempting to grind up, they finally wound up with the last part of the Trinity warframe, the Systems. Once Ordis informed the group of their findings, Travis sat down to take a breather, Vi jumped and dashed around like a hyperactive child while John resorted to knocking himself straight down on the floor to catch some zeds.

After a while, John's sleep was interrupted by a violent shaking, accompanied by the idyllic face of the purple kid shaking him awake.

"John! John! It's done!" Vi shouted, with an almost unrecognizable high-pitched voice.

"Done?" John stood up from the spot he had fallen asleep on.

"Yes! It took three days but it's here! I can't wait!" Vi replied, seemingly pushing her voice into an even higher pitch.

Travis and John eyed Vi as she closed her eyes and stood still in front of the warframe, as if she was trying to command it. After a few seconds of absolutely nothing, Vi turned around panicked.

"The transference!" She shouted, as her voice returned to its normal pitch. "I can't believe I forgot about it!"

"Oh yeah, that WAS a problem, right?" John said as he held the bottom of his helmet in an inquisitive stance and reminded himself of the fact.

"We… had… three days." Travis chimed in.

"I got it!" John once more tapped his palm with his fist. "Where is your Lotus friend?" He finished, heighting on his resolve.


	6. You Again?

"Lotus?" Vi asked, having a rushed, confused fit. "I've met her before, I mean, she helps - helped - me in virtually every mission. But after a while she stopped. I can't… remember..." Vi tried to finish her sentence, though she was unable to recall what had happened and hit her head a few times instead.

"It's alright kiddo, you don't have to… do that. It's creepy." John intervened, stopping her self flagellation.

"Where… do you… find her?" Travis walked in.

Vi stared at Travis, not long before stammering a few syllables out.

"L-lua? I mean we could use a teleporter and..." Vi managed to let out, before they were inadvertently interrupted by Ordis.

"Corpus fighter detected at increasing proximity. It seems that they're coming straight at us, Operator. Actually, they're right he-" Ordis then chimed in, being rudely interrupted by unprovoked fire of the chasing Corpus fighter, throwing the ship in a momentary shake.

"Do we have any weapons?!" John said in an unusual tone of desperation, straining his voice as he regained balance.

"We have - _had -_ a sentry turret, but its ammo reserves are empty." Ordis replied.

Another turn, another strafe of beams that the orbiter's shields sustained.

"We're sitting ducks here! Ordis, full throttle to..." Vi started.

"Anywhere!" John quacked as he collapsed over the ship's controls, right after the constant fire managed to pierce the shields, shaking the orbiter in its entirety. This emergency led Ordis to jumpstart the idle thrusters into full power, plunging the ship straight forward without care or notion of the path ahead.

The action seemingly infuriated the fighter, which pursued in aggravated prejudice.

"Ordis! There's an asteroid ring nearby! We could use it to escape the enemy radar!" Vi loudly announced.

"Good idea, Operator! Maybe the random debris won't do much to our shields as we protect the ship with our own bodies."

"Ordis!" Vi grunted.

"I'm sorry Operator, but I cannot recoup the shields fast enough for us to-"

But before Ordis could finish his orderly thought, he was interrupted by the sound of John ripping the control panels off their place.

"What are you doing?! You must not fiddle with the ship's inner components!" Ordis violently shifted his attention to John.

"You talk a lot for a ghost machine, you know that?" John replied, finally reaching the thrusters' controls.

After a single fist thrust into the ships internal components, the ship took a deep dive into the debris cloud. The somewhat apart asteroids served only as background, as the hand-controlled ship waved its way between the closer and sharper of the debris that occasionally prickled the hull. The erratic movement of the ship, caused by its violent plunge, in turn caused turbulence inside of the orbiter. John eventually lost his balance and was knocked to the back, right before the arsenal, this caused the thrusters to shut off.

As everyone else grasped something in attempts to have a still foot on the ship, a voice whipped out the ever trembling silence:

" _You're surrounded! Please activate your counter-thrusters and remain idle. You have no means of esca-"_

Without rhyme or reason, a sudden giant Corpus capital ship was drawn on the cockpit of the shuttle, and it was getting closer at incredible high speeds. Before anyone could muster a reasonable response, the ship's unexpected velocity and inability to respond to the threats smashed head-on into the hull of the Corpus capital ship, cleaving through the hardened metal and crashing into the cockpit.

Comically, or not, the ship's sudden barge was halted by the strengthened alloys of the Corpus, allowing the ship to sink itself in just right, and avoid a disastrous decompression. The commanding Comba let out a familiar voice:

"What… the living hell…?"

From the ruined cockpit window, there rose Travis and Vi. Almost outflanked by Scrambi Corpus, John took the opportunity to rise up from debris. Again.

" _Ormah'lore!_ " The rash voice erupted from the temporarily fallen crewman.

"What the hell did you just do to my ship?" The identified Comba stepped forward, ordering his fellow crewmen to surround the three.

John stepped out of the oblique ship and stepped once more in Corpus flooring.

"You attacked us!" John said in a reasonably pissed-off tone.

"Right." The Comba limited himself to say, as the surrounding Crewmen and Scrambi tightened their circle.

"John, I'd love for you to stay and chat but I'm afraid that I've gotten what I wanted." Ormah'lore hissed maliciously.

As soon as this was said, the three were simultaneously pounced by the subordinates of Ormah'lore and, when met by the expected resistance of the trio, they gladly removed their prods and tazed them to high hell. Soon after their bodies quivered in electric essence, they were knocked unconscious.

Once John gathered his senses, he slowly rose from the cot he was haphazardly thrown onto. With back pain, he looked around only to find himself in a small prison cell. The walls were white, solid metal and the blue force-field stopped his attempts at walking away into the one way hallway in front of him. Several times.

Discontent with his attempts at fleeing, John resorted to squash his palms on the force-field and exclaim for his friends. Several times.

"I heard you, I heard you." Vi's somnolent voice echoed through the hallway.

"Where are you guys?!" John asked.

"I'm… here." Travis' voice erupted from John's right.

"I can see your voice's location but I can't see _you_ , Travis." John declared.

"We've been jailed." Vi perceptively described their situation.

John gave up. He sat down at a corner and banged the corner of his helmet against the line where the walls met.

"By the way Vi, what were you saying back in the ship? Before we were attacked?" John asked.

"Well, as far as how I remember reaching Lotus, is by using one of those teleporters, you know, with the keys." Vi replied.

"Yes I know." Said John, not knowing.

"I was thinking we could… you know. Try." Vi finished.

The interrupting Corpus noticed their consciousness and walked in, accompanying Ormah'lore to meet up the three caged birds. Many armed, Ormah'lore stopped right in front of the jail cell belonging to Vi, gazing upon her own figure.

"Oh I still can hardly believe it." Ormah'lore's words echoed through the hallway, leading Vi to recoil her facial expression into disgust.

"A Tenno child." Ormah'lore continued, despite the social cues not to. "With you I can finally harness your power."

"You're wasting your time." Vi said with a disappointed tone, after grabbing her right elbow and sitting on her cot, defeated. "I don't have the transference. I'm all out. Empty. Kaput."

"I don't think that's how you use kaput." John added.

Ormah'lore narrowed his eyes and frowned his eyebrows, tilting his head up in somewhat disbelief.

"Is that true?" Ormah'lore asked.

"Yes. I can't even do the most basic movements, and they have a section just for that!" Vi said, standing up and wildly gesturing to no avail, before giving up and perching herself on the cot's corner once more.

"But we can!" John jumped like a child. "Vi, quick, tell them about Lua."

"Lua?" Ormah'lore inquired.

"John!" Vi scolded John. "No. Nothing, never mind about that."

"Go on." Ormah'lore said, turning to John, not convinced what Vi had to say.

John went to relay what Vi had previously told him. Ormah'lore drew a swift smile and rose his left hand, signalling the crewman to punch the keypad and release the force-fields. The three were then instructed to leave in an orderly manner, such an order disregarded by John until he was prodded back in line.

"Here is the deal." Ormah'lore barked. "I'll take you to one of those void portals, and you swear you'll take us to the source of the power."

"I'll have to discuss it with my peers." John eloquently put.

"Fine." Ormah'lore conditionally said. "But you only have five minutes before I barge in and demand a yes."

As soon as the doors closed behind the leaving Corpus, the group dismantled the organized line and faced each other. Vi resorted only to glaring at John while he calmed her vitriol by assuring it'd be fine, asking questions like "what's the worst that could happen" or "what if we can't retrieve it" or "can I go to the bathroom now". Travis limited himself to listening.

"We just have to get off their hands." John prudently says. "This seems to be our best shot."

"What if we can't get to Lotus? I don't really remember how to.. get there."

"Then we leg it to whatever that portal's leading us. Whatever fate is inside of that portal oughta be better than what Ormah'lore has in store for us."

Silence reigned in as the group decided what was best. Vi took a mental leap of faith and sighed in defeat, admitting to John that'd they go for it. John, presumably, drew a smile under his helmet and jumped to Travis.

"You with us?" He asked.

Before Travis could muster a response, the safety doors slid across and Ormah'lore's frame stepped inside, holding a taser prod and a handful of evil intentions.

"I told you I'd be back in five minutes to get a yes out of…" Ormah'lore intruded.

"We'll do it." Vi interrupted.

"Splendid!" Ormah'lore exclaimed, before throwing his deactivated prod across the room and leading the group out into the main cockpit.

Even though they were out of the prison cell, they now felt more imprisoned than ever, as the darkened sky of the Milky Way drew across the windows, surrounded by equal helmets in gridded unison. Some were preoccupied with the flashy screens and buttons while others silently contemplated the group's existence.

After the anxious walk came to a stop, Ormah'lore introduced them to the cockpit. The ship was being steered towards a nearby facility that could facilitate their objectives. The group was briefed on their objectives, to activate the portal.

"I'll provide an escort. To ensure your safety and to make sure you don't have any funny ideas." Ormah'lore explained, turning to the silently agreeing group. He was used to receiving silence as a response, so he cheerfully took it as a yes.

"Now, the trip is going to take a while, feel free to lolligag however you please inside this room - once we're there we'll let you know." Ormah'lore finished, before turning away into the blue-streaked console ahead of him.

As per the prophecy, the ride took a while, leading the group to let the guard down and wander off, sitting in crevices or half walls to cradle their boredom. Once a lifetime of waiting was over, one Corpus henchman called them off.

"Get up. We're here." He said, poking each one of them with a turned off prod.

"Oh hell, I was liking the lactic acid on my joints." John dusted himself off as he rose.

The sleepy trio was conducted to the loading bay, where a myriad of soldiers awaited them to board a transport shuttle. Upon seeing the vast amount of soldiers, the group stood in a moment of awe before being pushed to walk further.

"Just like my incarceration." John let out before leading the group into the shuttle.

As soon as the three hit the closest seats next to the wall, the small army of crewmen poured in, taking the remaining seats. The prodmen stuck close to the group as the shuttle's door finally closed. In an uneasy, awkward silence between the group and the soldiers, the ship rumbled into life and was let out into the void, before entering the atmosphere of Europa.

Not too soon the ship came to a halt, and the ever so soft crash of the landing gear hinted towards the fact that they might have landed. Shortly after, the shuttle door came down, letting the frosty breeze bite the ones inside and realize they're in an icy corpus facility. The soldiers poured out towards the facility and the prodmen prudently led the group towards the portal.

After a while of navigating throughout corpus machinery infused with ice, they found the portal. It was there. Vi automatically glared at the immensity and unconsciously walked forward, seemingly trying to absorb the ancient Orokin architecture. A prodman tried to pull her back into formation but was ultimately stopped by Ormah'lore's hands. Her mind wandered into a spiral of seemingly lost memories and fragments were returning to her. Words that she recalled but couldn't finish - feelings that once were true that no longer could be described. Faces that she remembered but couldn't nail down the details. She then lost her balance and knelt before the projector of the portal, the machine that opened up the portal from a void key. John instinctively reached his hand over, before Vi rose alone.

"You okay _Vri-anna_?" John blurted out. "That was creepy."

"Yes, I'm fine." Vi responded.

"Well?" Ormah'lore interrupted.

"This is it. I remember this faintly from a very long time ago." Vi replied, who started messing around the projector.

After a while of fiddling with the machine, whether by the remaining Transference in her blood, by a fluke, by a combination of both, or by an unknown force still connected to her, the projector roared on. The portal area flourished in void energy and sudden winds grazed by the dozens of denizens inside of the room. But the portal was different. It was pure white. It wasn't violent, like many void portals. It was soft, caring, almost protruding a loving aura.

In spite of its aura, the Corpus took up arms and defensively aimed towards the portal, as they've never seen a portal open without a key. And the times it happened they were vehemently attacked. Vi stepped forward to meet the portal, but John and Travis kept in tow. Ormah'lore gladly reminded them of their deal and sent a squad of crewmen to cross over with the group.

Once everyone surrounded the portal as close as their toes, they took the initiative to cross over. In a rushing blast of white, they arrived. The room was ivory white, clashing with golden highlights, cladded with ancient orokin furniture, flora and memorabilia. No sound was to be made other than the intruding footsteps of the gang. Even the portal that took them in respected the silence.

From nothing, a violent wind encompassed the group and slashed them all, excluding the now confused Vi. The Corpus crewmen were immediately torn apart and dematerialized - whereas Travis and John withstood the wind at full force, covering their faces with their arms, as if that'd help. Vi stepped back, confused and frightened, she continued her path until she hit an astounded figure. Once she turned around, her eyes widened to the face of Lotus, drawing her arm out, as if commanding the winds.

Lotus ignored the little girl and focused on the pair resisting the void so elegantly. John was pure blue at this moment in time and Travis didn't seem to be succumbing any time soon.

"What IS this?!" Lotus exclaimed.

Vi snapped out of her childhood trance and leapt forward.

"Stop! They're my friends!" she cried out, clinging to her arm desperately.

Lotus dropped her friends. John took the time to bray a relieving exhale, with Travis following the same suit by catching his breath.

"Fellas… we gotta… stop bullying… us…" John coughed in between wheezes.

"I... agree..." Travis limited himself.

"My child… your friends?" Lotus turned to Vi.

"Yes, and… we've come here to ask for help." Vi announced.

Lotus looked into the eyes of Vi and let her guard down. She paced forwards and allowed Vi to follow her further into the white room. Vi approached Lotus, who stopped by a small canal of flowing water.

"I can't use the transference." Vi put it bluntly.

Lotus didn't say anything, but instead placed her hand across Vi's forehead. This triggered a sequence of faded memories to once more arise in Vi. She lost the power of her legs and collapsed, forcing Lotus to envelop her arm around her back. John and Travis once more tried to leap to her safety but the situation was quickly controlled.

"You poor thing." Lotus said, letting Vi regain her consciousness.

"You must find these plants." She finished, handing Vi over a small holographic card.

"Trimming jobs, my favorite." John said.

Lotus seemed to look up at John, presumably with a piercing stare as John felt mildly to extremely uncomfortable being near her, taking the opportunity to take a few prudent steps back.

"Once you're done collecting this, combine it all into a tea and drink it my child. The power should flow back, and I'll talk to you once you do." Lotus turned once more at Vi, rising as she does.

"What will it do?" Vi inquired.

"You'll see my child, once you've drunk it, you'll see." Lotus assuredly finished.

"That wasn't very assuring, but there's still a mighty problem." John interrupted.

Lotus violently traced John's position again, this time John stood steadfast against her aura.

"The Corpus are waiting to siphon your energy from the portal. If we go back there empty handed they'll throw me into a pit of fire, cook your daughter here and I don't even want to start what they're going to do to you, Travis. They're going to mess you up." John added.

"Is that so?" Lotus turned to Vi, as if not trusting John.

"Yes, we need your help further. I'm sorry." Vi sorrowfully put it.

Lotus smiled. She cast her right hand at a corner and opened a small portal for them to cross.

"Take this portal. Call upon your ship." She directed at Vi.

Lotus then marched towards the white portal, before crossing in front of dozens of Corpus troops. Ormah'lore could barely contain his excitement at seeing the pure form of the void materialized in front of him. He ordered Lotus' seizure, which led to the Corpus crewmen charging the elegant silhouette of Lotus. She then cast her left hand towards the masses, which led a familiar wheezing wind to perforate their lines and send flying those lucky, killing those unlucky.

She quickly aimed the flurry to the projector, with the intent of destroying it, but not before she stepped inside the portal herself. But before she could do this, a familiar figure erupted from the portal behind her, to which she snapped to.

"Oh, whoops, wrong portal." John snickered, before melding himself slowly back in the portal.

Once she knew it was safe, she threw her hand and collapsed the projector. But by the time the portal disengaged and the winds of the void settled, the silhouette was now missing. Ormah'lore cursed his being once more, after finding out his only chance was ruptured.

Both returned to the ivory room, Lotus stopped John by suspending him in the air, she wrapped around him and looked him in his very face.

"I'm not sure why she chose to trust you. But you keep her safe. In case things go south." Lotus let out, releasing John.

"Go north then, gotcha." John presumably winked at Lotus, dusting himself off.

Lotus then saw to it that the crewman's form dissipated in the portal completely, so that she knew it was safe to close the portal.


	7. A New Foe

_Unexistence. Existence. Both or none. Emptiness. Repleteness. It's all but both conditions. I can't feel much, my existence, or lack thereof, or both of these, is limited to… being there. Unseeing. Seeing. Both. None. It is a state of being, and not being. Wait, what was that? A charge like a lightning bolt. What was it? An actual feeling over the permanent stasis? A stricken line of actual change, instead of the perpetual nothing? What is it? Can I fetch it? Can I go to it? Can I get to it? Can I eat it? Can I… exist? I'll try. Reach out to it. Get it. Munch on it. Or not. Depends. I. Need. It._

It wasn't too late after the portal came to an engulfing halt, right after John narrowly avoided being stranded behind, dropping the group in a now eerily silent location. Vi noticed his late arrival and approached John silently:

"Why were you so late? What happened?" Vi questioned.

"Oh, the usual." John deflected. "Holding up, miscellaneous threats, violence. The usual Wednesday."

Vi, in spite of being suspicious, accepted John's answer, and turned around, not before scoffing a little towards the silent hallways that led before them.

"Pretty hi-tech stuff," John commented.

"Lua." Vi marveled at the decrepit surroundings. "I've… it's been a long time since I've last been here."

Vi then flourished into a sprint. John was forced to follow and Travis lagged behind trying only not to get lost. In a race of melding memories of the past with the present, Vi found herself running in a crowd of like-minded people. Racing in between people, jumping beside them, the collective chatter of the crowd illuminated the room and filled her ears. It's as if she never left! The hallways shone bright gold, the doors resonated that familiar sound and the steps echoed as they always did. She arrived at an intersection before a sudden thought crashed into her mind.

"Rubi!" She called out, as she fastened her pace once more, zig-zagging past the faceless people across the hallways, jumping through the undying plants, until she hit a conforming door, with no particular distinguishing features amongst the thousands they've passed through or around. Once the door slid open, reality's weight crashed upon Vi's eyes, as the now darker, decrepit and ruined room stared at her in resonating silence.

"Rubi…?" her voice quivered, containing tears. She looked around once more, finding only dusty panels and tiles. The small bed beside the wall showed no signs of anyone laying on it for a long time. The abandoned circuitry still emitted light from the depths of the satellite, though it kept no life. Vi dolefully sat in the old bed, seemingly stuck in memories past.

John eventually caught up with Vi and Travis filled the room after they've momentarily lost her in the race. Noticing her silhouette sitting across a bed, the sprinting led to a sudden stop and skid until the pair found themselves by the door frame.

"What… got into you?" Travis panted.

"I… can never tell… when you're tired, Travis." John pitched in, before noting Vi's state. "Vi? What happened?"

"This is… was… Rubi's room." She said, now expelling said tears and drawing a bitter smile. "She used to be one of my best friends. I had known her forever until a cataclysm happened. I can't remember exactly what happened but I left her behind. I couldn't be brave enough. Not even for her."

Vi took a pause to raise herself, soaking her sleeve with her tears. Travis took the opportunity to enter the room and inspect it, while John simply stared into space, absorbing the information.

"I've had this stashed away for the longest time. I have no idea where it all went. But it was suppressed inside of me. I can't… even remember when or how I did that. It's been far too long." Vi let out.

John takes this opportunity to get in and attempt a heartfelt hug, leading Vi to recoil, pushing away his arms, and approach the wall on the other end of the room. For a bit, the droning hum of the surviving circuitry reigned the ambiance before John let out:

"So. Orokin. How were they like?" He finished, sitting on the bed.

"It's… been a long time. I've... come at peace to the fact that I've mostly forgotten them." Vi replied.

"Were they… that bad… to you?" Travis chimed in.

"No! Not at all. At least some of them weren't. Rubi was one of my best friends and… one of them."

"What, Orokin? I thought you and them didn't see eye to eye, know what I mean?" John let out.

"Oh, that I don't know. She was a bit different. Didn't really believe the whole 'grandeur' thing. More of a simple person, you know? Look at her room." Vi finished, lifting her arms up, alluding to the rest of the room.

The group fell silent once again. Vi looked down as if defeated.

"She didn't deserve what she got." Vi finished, as she started walking to leave the room. Travis left soon after, as to not lose Vi again. John stepped across the room.

"Well, if you excuse me, Rubi," John said as he crossed the doorway, approaching the still awkward situation.

"So. We better get going to those flowers, huh?" John let out.

Vi limited herself to say nothing and moved forward through the ruined hallways. They still emitted a glitter of light, but nothing compared to the blinding beauty that the rose-tinted glasses Vi saw them through.

"So. How are we going to call upon your ship, your majesty?" John added.

Vi remembered a control room. Not too far from where they were, but directed the group towards a large chamber that held a few terminals, still carrying the decaying power of the Orokin. The old gold still glittered through the small number of lights still turned on. Plantlife overtook the ground, and the glass panels that circled the terminal were all but smashed. The group ran upon the first functional terminal once it was sighted, Vi doing most of the work to recall the shuttle.

"You know, I've never actually even seen a bathroom around here. How did you guys…?" John let out amidst the typing symphony Vi was producing.

Before Vi could draw a conclusion, the terminal's holographic projector let out a familiar shape, alongside a familiar voice.

"Operator?! Oh my, I'm so relieved! They said you were left behind in the void. I thought it was _lingo_ for _getting shot_!" Ordis let out.

"Ordis, can you hear me? Are you able to fetch us at the location I'm calling you from?" Vi's voice echoed through the empty chamber.

"Yes. Thankfully, or not, the Ormah'lore retrieved part of the blueprints back in Neptune and they were able to repair me. I'm not sure if those blueprints are in safe hands with him. I just… need… " Ordis let out, before cutting to clashing metal and explosive sounds, then returning to silence.

"Ordis? Ordis?! Where are you?!" Vi cried out, with no response, in spite of Vi's numerous attempts at contacting him.

Vi cursed the air with a sharp grunt, while John approached.

"Hey now, kid, that sounded like an exit explosion. I know one when I hear one. Ordis can call any time too." John added.

It wasn't too soon that John's prophecy came to fruition, the terminal lit up as Ordis' voice violently shredded the silence.

"Operator! I have managed to get off from the Corpus hands! I am heading over and I should be there in about ten to twenty minutes." He let out.

Even though this calmed Vi, worrying was not completely off her mind, but she was eased up. The group unanimously agreed to sit around the terminal, hoping to read Ordis once more. Vi decided to take it upon herself to lie next to the terminal, Travis invested his time in inspecting the old machinery, while John tapped his helmet alongside the large windows that peered into space.

In the corner of John's eye, he saw a small gash slit across the skies. It wasn't anything like he'd ever seen before. It looked as if someone had cut space with a knife, letting out whatever was on the other side of the fabric of the universe. It looked… big and in the distance. It wasn't. It was small and right by the window John was leaning against.

It was strange. The small full bright white spewed a small tentacle that immediately filled it and tore it the more as it tried to cross. The strange colored tentacle crashed against the window multiple times but it was frail where it couldn't penetrate the decayed windows.

John barely even looked at it before scoffing at its attempts to break the window. It wasn't until the small cut in space and time slashed across the outside of the building, and let out dozens of bigger tentacles. These crashed against the structure and woke everyone up from their somnolent boredom. It wasn't too long before the invading tentacles breached the aged metal, leading towards the group amassed within.

"What was that?!" Vi woke up as the building rumbled.

"It's… tentacles?" Travis pondered, looking to the outside, peering into the bright white portal that expanded, launching even more tentacles, trying to seemingly grapple the entire satellite.

"I have no idea, something just appeared outside and now they are everywhere," John exclaimed.

Soon enough, the tentacles moved both rock and metal alike in order to find the stranded group. The violent tentacles crushed through the already broken moon and trashed the metal within, finally showing themselves to the group.

Vi was immediately grabbed by one as she attempted to escape towards the tunnels, letting the beast take a hold of her. With this physical contact, the beast abruptly invaded Vi's mind, torturing her with the voices of the beyond. Unable to maintain her mental fortitude, Vi collapsed, unconscious and still in the grasp of the beast.

John took this opportunity to scatter lasers alongside the appendage that held Vi. Usually, these pitiful weapons would bounce off the thickened skin of the beast of the beyond, but these bullets shimmered with seemingly powerful hate stemming from John. It tried to riposte by grabbing John and squeezing the life out of him, but his strength and demeanor (and shields) withered the tentacle away. The beast was taken aback, as he had an aura it hadn't felt in a long time.

Repulsed, the beast dropped Vi and retracted a few of its tentacles. John took this opportunity to throw Vi over his shoulder and escape through the maze of tunnels. Travis managed to crash through the tentacles, avoiding narrowly being captured by the beast.

The two met up as the beast worked to encapsulate Lua. It attempted to stave off the group by completely engulfing the satellite and demolishing it. It felt the aura that Vi put out. It got angrier and angrier by the second.

After a few minutes of running, the group met a breach upon the ground they walked, a cliff hanging over the infinity of space, struck between structures of the Orokin.

The tentacles approached. They scoured the ground and filled the ground. Not even the occasional sentient could survive the onslaught as it was engulfed and crushed beyond recognition. As fate would have it, Ordis appeared in the distance, gleaming the bright sunlight in the distance.

The orbiter came along and shot out the landing craft, shooting its way to the crevice where Travis and John were cornered. Ordis had seen them. The landing craft hastily opened its door as John haphazardly stored Vi within and grabbed onto the machine. It wasn't until the ship took flight once more that he had seen the giant Corpus capital ship chasing Ordis.

Once the Liset clamped to the docking bay, the group fled to meet in the cockpit. John took a detour to sit Vi at the somatic link. Travis already set himself on the cockpit as John approached, leading him to scream at the circuitry.

"Ordis, you bastard! You brought them with you!" John let out, with an uncharacteristic enraged tone.

"Ah, Mr. Rhodes, very pleasant to see you again. And smell you again. I was unable to shake them off my tail. What have you done to the operator?" Ordis let out.

"Something… attacked us. Big… tentacles, the entirety of Lua… has fallen." Travis explains.

Ordis takes the time to scan the outside. Thousands of hundreds of tentacles have wrapped around Lua, locking it much like grapevine on an old wall.

"Almighty…" Ordis uttered, almost not believing what his sensors were picking up, forgetting that he was now heading towards the Corpus capital ship.

"Ordis! Corpus!" A familiar voice shouted up the cockpit. Vi pushed John aside and sat in front of the terminals alongside the cockpit.

"Operator! Oh, I was very worried that these brutes had done you wrong. Did you make it?" Ordis asked as it reversed the flight away from the capital ship.

"I talked with Lotus. There's a way to fix it but we need these ingredients." Vi let out, shoving a paper down a crevice, which gleefully swallowed it and let Ordis take a look.

"Alright. This plant life can be found in Eris, this one in…"

"What… about the Corpus?" Travis let out, insinuating to the capital ship still pursuing them.

"Moreover, what about that giant-ass thingie they have over there?" John presumably pointed towards the beast from the beyond.

"That wouldn't be a problem." Ordis let out, introducing footage from behind the orbiter, showcasing the Corpus capital ship infested with thousands of tentacles, crushing the ship to bits, leading John to become quieter than usual.

"Turn this ship around." John let out. Vi, Travis and, presumably, Ordis looked at John with disbelief.

"You seriously cannot expect us to go back there." Vi directed.

"Please, just turn the ship around." John deflected.

"I cannot possibl- oh he's doing that again." Ordis tried to speak, but not before John ran to the docking back, trying to forcefully dislodge the landing craft.

Vi sprinted to meet John and shouted with a confused, irate face:

"You can't possibly be going back there. Do you know what he's been trying to do to you? To me? To all of us?"

John paused his work to silently eye Vi. In a momentary push of sincerity, John let out, before ripping the landing craft from the orbiter and jump:

"I can't expect you to understand, Vi."


End file.
